Unleashing the Beast
Retiring my ageing WatchGuard M200, I swap in the UniFi UDM Beast — a hardware tour, first iperf and WAN tests, the BGP/FRR setup, and the homelab services I’m consolidating onto it.
Automating vSphere Golden Images with Packer and GitHub Actions
A walk-through of an automated golden-image pipeline for vSphere: HashiCorp Packer builds six Ubuntu LTS templates (22.04, 24.04, 26.04 — server and desktop) driven by three GitHub Actions workflows covering PR validation, parallel template builds, and ISO management via a self-hosted runner.
Automating vSphere Power Management driven by Ansible and SemaphoreUI
In this post I’ll walk through how I use vSphere Power Management driven by Ansible and SemaphoreUI to automatically reduce ESXi host electricity consumption — saving real money on my Octopus Agile tariff by toggling hosts between Low Power and Balanced policies. Introduction One of the larger costs of running my homelab is the electricity….
Automated VCF 9 Offline Depot
One Bash script turns a fresh Ubuntu VM into a VCF 9 Offline Depot: Traefik, Nginx, basic auth, and Let’s Encrypt wildcard certs via Cloudflare DNS.
- Ansible | Artificial Intelligence | Containers | Devops | Homelab | NVIDIA | Traefik | VMware
Automating the Deployment of my Homelab AI Infrastructure
Learn how to use Ansible to configure an Ubuntu VM for use with NVIDIA based AI workloads in vSphere
Managing my Homelab with SemaphoreUI
An intro on how I use SemaphoreUI to manage my Homelab
Warp – The intelligent terminal
How Warp is helping me run my homelab.
How I Migrated from Pocket to Hoarder with AI Integration
Update: Hoarder has now been renamed to Karakeep due to a trademark issue I’ve been on a mission recently to regain control of my data.
- TrueNAS Scale | VMware | vSAN | vSphere
How to Run ZFS on VMware vSphere: Setup Guide and Best Practices
Introduction Copy on Write Disk IDs Trim Introduction I have run a number of systems using ZFS since the earliest days of my homelab using Nexenta, all the way back in 2010.
Self Hosting AI Stack using vSphere, Docker and NVIDIA GPU
Artificial intelligence is all the rage at the moment, It’s getting included in every product announcement from pretty much every vendor under the sun.
Can you really squeeze 96TB in 1U ?
Yes, that’s a clickbait title. But technically it’s possible if I dropped all drive redundancy… I recently saw an advert for a server that was just too good to be true.
Home Network Upgrade to 25Gb/s with MikroTik Switching
My journey to superfast networking in my homelab
